Family Reunion in Utah

We spent all of last week in Utah to have a Burgess family reunion.  My parents and all of my brothers' and sisters' families were there.  We set out Sunday morning (June 23rd) and drove to Kanab to spend the night.  Rob and Tina's family also spent the night there at the same hotel as us.  Then next morning we finished the rest of our drive to the Salt Lake area.  We stopped briefly in Lehi to visit my grandparents.  It was fun to see them.

 

 

We stayed in Murray, and just like two years ago, we rented a really big house to stay in together.  Monday night, when we had all arrived, Mom and Dad gave each grandchild a towel with their name embroidered on it.  They also had matching shirts for everyone.  Each shirt has a number on the sleeve that represents the order in which we came into the family.  The kids think the numbers are really cool.  I am number 6, Nate is 15, Natalie is 17, Kelton is 20, Damon is 27, and Arie is 30. 

 

 

On Tuesday morning a bunch of us went to the Salt Lake Temple in shifts.  I had never done a session there before. It became more memorable when Nate and I were asked to be the witness couple, which is something we have never been asked to do before.  I really enjoyed the live session and found it easier to pay attention to real people instead of the movie. 

 

All of us purchased a 7 Peaks Pass of all Passes prior to our trip.  It turned out to be a great deal because the pass was around $30 and it got us admission to the water park and fun centers around the area.  It also came with a $20 food voucher, per pass.  And due to an error, we also got $20 vouchers, per pass, for arcade tokens.  On Tuesday afternoon, most everyone headed to the Lehi Fun Center.  I stayed with Arie at the house so she could take a nap.

 

From what I understand, these weren't so much "Bumper Boats," but were "Spray and get everyone soaked Boats."

Kelton, Hannah, and Christian 

Callie and Natalie

 

Go Karts...

Natalie and Uncle Chad 

Kelton and Uncle Rob, followed by Bryce 



 Damon and Nate

 

Natalie, Callie, and Kira on one of the rides.  Poor Kira is hanging on for dear life.

 

On Wednesday we all went to the 7 Peaks water park in Salt Lake.  It was a really hot day, which was good, but it brought out a pretty big crowd.  Our kids are all so different with water.  Natalie loves it and had a blast.  We eventually ended up leaving her there with aunts and uncles because the rest of our kids were ready to leave.  Kelton loves the water too, but does whatever he can to keep it away from his head.  So, he's not fond of the water slides.  Damon was not a fan of the water park.  He got really upset if he was splashed and wanted nothing to do with even the little kid slides.  Arie doesn't really seem to enjoy being in the water either.  Overall, the water park wasn't a huge success with our family, but we were able to use our food vouchers to buy some good food for lunch.

 

On Thursday morning our family (minus a sleeping Arie), Melanie and Jade, and Christy and Hudson went to tour the Sweets Candy factory.  All of the kids were so good during the tour.  Then we loaded up on candy in their shop afterwards.  They had giant bags of things on sale for less than the little containers we planned to buy, so we really did come home with a lot of candy.  And the kids had so much fun picking out their own flavors of salt water taffy.

 Thursday night my Grandma and Grandpa came over with my Aunt Deonne to have dinner with us.  My cousins Kevin and Jennifer came too.  Grandpa and Grandma's short term memories aren't what they used to be (we answered a lot of the same questions over and over again), but I think they are doing pretty great for 94 and 92 years old.

I love this picture because I guess it just goes to show that you are never too old to put bunny ears on your own mother.

 

On Friday, we spent most of the day back at the Fun Center.  This was the first time I went.  We spent our time playing laser tag, a round of glow-in-the-dark mini golf, and using up our token vouchers on arcade stuff.  We won enough tickets to get Kelton a large stuffed snake, Natalie a stuffed dolphin (like Callie and Kira), and Damon four cute stuffed puppies.  We also had enough money on our food cards to get lunch.

 

Friday night we took family pictures in our matching shirts.  I was relieved that my boys were cooperative for the large group picture.  We didn't have anyone there to take the picture for us, so Erica set a timer on her camera.  Thanks in part to a stuffed elephant from the fun center sitting on the tripod, we got a pretty good shot, given the number of small kids involved.

 

Our family.

 

After pictures we had a piñata for the kids.  Each of them took a few swings at it.  Then grandpa finished it off in the only way fitting for him... with a golf club.

 

On Saturday we all headed out to go home.  We were in no hurry because we were stopping in Flagstaff for the night and would have nothing to do at the hotel.  So we went to Temple Square before leaving Salt Lake.  We hadn't made it over there yet because it was a bit hard to get places with Arie needing two naps a day.  Melanie and Jade came with us.  We didn't do a whole lot because it was hot and all the little legs weren't very fast.  We took some pictures, went right up to the temple, and went to see the statue of Christ in the visitors center.  We wanted to go to the Church History Museum, but it just didn't happen.

I think it's sweet how children respond to this statue.

 

The older kids just wanted to touch him.

 

Natalie has her hand on the nail print in Christ's foot--which is the reason for her face.

 

Then as we were leaving Temple Square to head home, something really neat happened.  We were in our car, stopped at a red light, when Elder L. Tom Perry of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles walked across the crosswalk, right in front of our car.  He was all by himself, dressed in street clothes--which I didn't know they ever got to do.  :)   He stopped at the corner and waited to cross the other way.  There was a family on the corner with him, and he said hi to them, but I don't think they knew who he was.  I wished we were out walking instead of in our car so we could say hi and have the kids shake his hand.  But we had to be content with just pointing him out.  And, I wasn't even smart enough to pull out Nate's iphone and take a picture.  So I have no proof.  You will have to take my word for it.  But do you know what I noticed?  Just like always, he looked so happy.

 

Other random stuff and pictures:

 

I put together this game to play.  Everyone had to figure out which picture was which grandchild.  Melanie got the most right.  My dad and Tennyson gave up after about two seconds.

1) Christian.  2) Kira.  3) Jade.  4) Natalie.  5) Callie.  6) Maddison.  7) Kelton.  8) Dustin.  9) Bryce.  10) Easton.  11) Hannah.  12) Hudson.  13) Damon.  14) Trevor.  15) Shalae.  16) Denae.  17) Brayden.  18) Emily.  19) Arie.

 

The basement of the house had a large gameroom in it.  I spent some time playing pool with my Dad and Melanie.  On a different day, we played pool in teams--Melanie and Dad against Nate and me.  Melanie and I played some ping pong too.  I wish we would have had more time to play more, because it was really fun. 

 

There was also a nice theater room in the basement.  We took advantage of it one afternoon and Melanie rented Oz: The Great and Powerful.  As fun as it was, I couldn't stay awake and ended up taking a nap after about the first 20 minutes.

 

These girls had a ton of fun playing together.  Maddison, Callie, Natalie and Kira.

 

These two boys are exactly the same size, despite being a year apart in age.  Christian is a year older than Damon.

 

Look at these cute babies.  Arie and Easton were taste testing the non-edible stuff for us.  Easton is one month older than Arie.

 

Mom, Christy, and the elephant taking family photos.

 

Kelton became Hannah's little shadow.  He wanted to do everything with her, eat next to her, etc... It was really cute.  I heard him say, "Where's Hannah?"  dozens of times during the week.

 

And last, but not least...  These pictures can't go without notice.

 

4th of July

We got to spend the day together as a family.  We didn't do a whole lot during the day.  Everything we could think to do involved being outside in our 100+ degree heat.  So we passed.  This evening, we took an exciting trip to Walmart, for lack of any better options, and bought some fireworks.

 

We fired up the BBQ for dinner, which means our kids had frozen chicken nuggets.  Maybe someday they will learn that things cooked on a grill taste good.  But Nate and I had steak.  After dinner, we had a family movie night and watched Rise of the Guardians.  None of us had seen it before.  We enjoyed it.

 

Even though it was late for the kids to still be awake, we went outside after the movie to do our fireworks.  We bought sparklers and those little popper things that come packed in sawdust that you throw on the ground.  The kids had a blast.  And I will admit that the parents had quite a lot of fun too.  It was pretty funny at first though, because our box of matches is very old and apparently, that affects their ability to lite.  So, in order to lite our sparklers, Nate was using our lighter fluid-filled lighter to lite the matches and then using the matches to light the sparklers.  Why didn't we just use the lighter to lite the sparklers?  I'm not quite sure.  I think we were trying to conserve the lighter fluid.  Anyways, after realizing that was ridiculous, especially because the sparklers sometimes took longer to light than the matchstick would burn, I went and got a couple of candles.  It worked great.

 

Happy Fourth of July!

Natalie's baptism

It is strange to have a child old enough to be baptized!  But Natalie is eight, and she was baptized last Saturday, June 1st.  My parents came down early (on Thursday) so my mom could help me make a dress for Natalie.  Nate's parents came on Friday, along with Tyler and Aurelie.  We had a full house that night!  Melanie and Jade came too and stayed with Rob and Tina and they all came to the baptism on Saturday morning. 

Natalie was so excited she could hardly hold still.  She couldn't wait to be baptized.  I think it was exciting for Nate to baptize his little girl, too.

Sneaking in beforehand to check out the font filling up...

Natalie (and Nate) said the water was hot.  We had been preparing her for the water to maybe be a bit cold.  Nate said it ended up being almost too hot.  When I was helping Natalie get dressed, I asked her how it felt when she was baptized.  She said it felt like being in heaven.  I thought that was cute.  She said the same thing about receiving the Holy Ghost.

Like I said before, my mom helped me make a dress for Natalie.  I actually made the whole thing from start to finish, but I needed my mom to help me understand what the pattern wanted me to do.  She was also hugely helpful because she pressed things for me along the way.  (By the way, having someone else there to press everything for you is the way to sew!)  Natalie loved her dress.  She wore it after she got baptized and also the next day at church.

All of the family who came to the baptism.

Our family.  We were a bit pictured out... it was hot and very sunny--not ideal for picture taking.

After the baptism, we had all the family come to our house for a lunch.  While we would have loved to have more family with us, I had to say that the amount of people we had at our house was absolutely perfect--meaning, we all fit and we didn't have to kick anyone outside into the 106 degree heat to eat.

After lunch I got in a fight with some frosting.  Sadly, the frosting won.  I know better than to try to decorate anything with frosting made with real butter (as opposed to margarine or part shortening).  It makes the frosting not hold its shape.  But, I still made the frosting that way, because it tastes better, and I went completely crazy trying to frost this "cake" for Natalie.  I would swirl the frosting on, it would look great for about 30 seconds, then melt into goo.  So, we got the camera ready, I gave the worse looking cupcakes a touch-up and we took a picture really quick.  It didn't look like I wanted it to (a.k.a. perfect), but it was better than nothing.  And it tasted great.

Then we called Natalie in to look at it.  We had been keeping her away and she knew there was some surprise with the cupcakes.  When she came in to look, she didn't really respond.  Then I realized that she wasn't tall enough to see it from the top.  So I picked her up, and she yelled, "It's my dress!!"

Earlier in the day, we put the dress on her that my sisters and I were baptized in.  I don't think she was too fond of it, but she didn't want to hurt our feelings.  :)  She told Nate, "this is embarrassing."  And Kelton was heard saying "that's ugly!"  Styles have definitely changed in the last quarter of a century.  But it was fun to see her in the dress I wore to be baptized.

 We all had a great day!  Natalie even decided on her own to fast the next day--which was Fast Sunday.  But it only lasted until after church when she decided that she was a little too hungry to keep going.  We love this girl who tries to do what's right.

Eight!

Natalie turned the milestone age of eight years old on Friday.  Her birthday was on the first day of summer break this year.  The night before, she was already on the countdown of how many hours were left until we would wake her up singing "Happy Birthday."  On her birthday, we "woke" her up at 6:30 to sing and give her presents.  I asked her later what time she actually woke up.  She sheepishly told me she had been awake since 5:00 and she couldn't help it, and she had been trying to wait patiently for us to come in.

Natalie's birthday was dominated by a specific theme.  My Little Pony, My Little Pony, and more My Little Pony.  There is a new 4th (I think) generation of these ponies.  They look totally different and are geared more towards Natalie's age group than for preschoolers like the ones before. 

Natalie was very excited by the presents she got from her grandparents.  She had been waiting for these particular items for quite some time.

G-ma and G-pa Burgess gave her Princess Cadence and Shining Armor with their wedding castle playset.

G-ma and G-pa Webb gave her a set of four ponies:  Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, Sweetie Belle, and their teacher, Miss Cheerilee.  All of these ponies she got from her grandparents she previously had made paper versions of them to play with.

She also got the long awaited Nightmare Moon.  And some more random extras.

She also got a MLP play tent, a Twilight Sparkle chapter book, a CTR ring, and new scriptures.  She was surprised to find her name printed on the scriptures and wondered how we did it.  In hindsight, we probably should have saved the ring and scriptures for a week and given them to her on her baptism day.  They were a bit overshadowed by the excitement of all the new ponies.  She is a little more than obsessed right now...

Playing in her room with all her new (along with the old) toys.  You can also see her new bed.

Natalie spent most of the day playing with her new ponies.  She requested pancakes for breakfast and mac and cheese for lunch.  She also got a large bowl of cottage cheese with her lunch.  She loves cottage cheese and rarely gets it because it's a bit expensive for a snack on a regular basis.  For dinner we all went to Olive Garden.  I also painted her fingernails and toenails with my nice nail polish.

I used a little bit of the batter from her cake to make a few cupcakes so she could have some cake on her actual birthday.  We sang "Happy Birthday" and had cupcakes when we got home from Olive Garden. 

I had to take a picture of Natalie after she fell asleep with all of her ponies lined up in her bed.  I think she said her new birthday ponies took her up to a grand total of 21 of the "normal sized" ponies.  I think she now has just about every one available for purchase at the moment.

On to the birthday party... We had her party the day after her birthday, on Saturday, so that Nate could be here to help out.  Sadly, he got a migraine and wasn't able to do much.  But it ended up being okay because less than half of the girls we invited were able to come--only three to be exact.  Natalie was a bit disappointed, but she was okay.  I think she was mostly sad because her best friend from school didn't come. 

Okay, time out for a second so I can rant a little.  (Skip this paragraph if you don't want to hear it.)  This party made me come to a few realizations.  #1--I kind of want to be done with birthday parties in general.  They are definitely a labor of love for my kids, and I guess that's why I keep doing them.  #2-- We are no longer inviting kids from school or kids from the neighborhood, no matter how much my kids beg.  They never come.  And I have to buy supplies and do all the prep work because they might show up...  The kids from church are the only ones who ever come.  They will now be the only ones invited.  Which leads to... #3-- When there is a lot of prep work involved, I am super limiting the number of kids and will check beforehand to make sure that those kids can come before I do all the prep work.  #4--From this time forth, I will always RSVP to other parties whether we are coming or not.  I guess overall, I just spent too much time on this party, which is my own fault.  So I kind of shared Natalie's disappointment at only having three (there were actually only 2 for the first 45 minutes) kids show up.  But again, my fault--I should have done more checking with people.  Now, all of that said and done... it was actually pretty nice and calm to only have three guests.  :)  Okay, the end.

Each girl got to paint their own ceramic figure.  Natalie had a pony, two girls had princesses and the last girl had a castle.  The girls loved this and spent a lot of time painting their ceramics.  Around the table starting at the front left are: Elnorra Shaffer, Lila Parry, Natalie, Damon, and Story Sanders.

I made pizza dough, and before the painting started, each girl got a ball of dough to make their own pizza.  They painted their ceramics while the pizzas were cooking.  Here they are eating their creations.

 

 

I made each girl a tote bag to take their stuff home in.  Originally, I was going to do this as part of the party activities.  The picture is actually one of those plastic party goodie bags.  There is a method of ironing plastic onto fabric so that it ends up looking like screen printing.  So I was going to let the girls iron the plastic onto the bags.  But to make a long story short, my sample bag proved the process wasn't going to work at the party and needed to be done in advance.  So, something that I intended to be fun and simple ended up being a LOT of work for me.  And I had to make 8 bags so that I would have one for each girl that might be coming.  But, the bags turned out really cute and I think the girls really liked them.  And each bag only cost me about $0.75 to make--well, as long as you don't figure in that whole "time is money" thing.



Ahh, the cake.  All things considered, it turned out alright.  Natalie wanted a Princess Celestia cake.  I found an image to use for a frosting transfer, because I didn't have any idea how else to do the cake.  Then I spent several days before Natalie's birthday making tote bags, buying craft supplies, cleaning the house and getting all the other party stuff ready.  Then it was Natalie's birthday and I only had the afternoon to do the frosting transfer.  There was no part of me that wanted to make it, or was awake enough to do so.  I ran the thought past Nate of just buying a Princess Celestia to put on the cake.  He said sure.  I immediately felt a whole bunch of stress melt away.  Even with this decision, I still utterly and completely ran out of time to make this cake.  I had things under control... the night before the party, I made one layer of the cake and made the frosting.  But I didn't get to the second layer of the cake until the morning of the party.  All of a sudden, it was 30 minutes before the party and the second layer of the cake wasn't even cooled down yet and all of the frosting was still white.  I think I ended up decorating this cake in record time.  Start to finish I think I spent about 15 minutes on it.

 

Happy Birthday to Natalie!  One more week until she gets one more special day--her baptism!